Using Starlight to Find Wandering Worlds

The animation depicts the phenomenon of gravitational microlensing. As an exoplanet passes in front of a more distant star, its gravity causes the trajectory of the starlight to bend, and in some cases results in a brief brightening of the background star as seen by a telescope. Teaming up on a global experiment in exoplanet observation, NASA’s K2 mission and Earth-based observatories on six continents will use gravitational microlensing to search for exoplanets that are too distant and dark to detect any o